This function shows its usefulness on a web site where a user is asked to entered a hexidecimal color code for a color. To prevent breaking W3C standard and having them enter in "neon-green" or the wrong type of code like 355511235.
In conjunction with strlen()  you could create a function like this:
function check_valid_colorhex($colorCode) {
    // If user accidentally passed along the # sign, strip it off
    $colorCode = ltrim($colorCode, '#');
    if (
          ctype_xdigit($colorCode) &&
          (strlen($colorCode) == 6 || strlen($colorCode) == 3))
               return true;
    else return false;
}